Apis Wise was approached by Sahlens Packing Co. after they were tasked by a customer with becoming Safe Quality Food (SQF) Program compliant for product distribution.
Safe Quality Food Program
“The Safe Quality Food (SQF) Program is a rigorous and credible food safety and quality program that is recognized by retailers, brand owners, and food service providers world-wide.
Recognized by the Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI), the SQF family of food safety and quality codes are designed to meet industry, customer, and regulatory requirements for all sectors of the food supply chain – from the farm all the way to the retail stores.”
The Model Before Apis
Apis Wise was already working with Sahlens to provide centralized case labeling, pallet labeling, and inventory control, adding the SQF module from the Apis Wise suite was an obvious next step.
One of the biggest problems that presented itself was that much of Sahlens old lot trace system was paper based. Almost all documents from the PO receipt of raw materials at the dock door to the use of those raw material on the production floor was recorded with pen and paper. Those documents were then collected at the end of the day, manually consolidated, and filed appropriately in a filing cabinet.
How It Works
Working with Sahlens, Apis Wise broke down the user workflows for each production process and identified key data collection points in the process. Apis was then able to digitize those workflows into a prompt and response workflow that the users could perform on a handheld in production real-time. Those workflows were each given specific transaction codes that were captured, timestamped, and stored in a database.
Digitizing all these user workflows eliminated the paper, pen, and file cabinet completely from the process.
The Result?
Using the data collected during the digitized production workflows and the Apis SQF interface, a raw material recall from a vendor or a finished good recall from Sahlens went from days’ worth of work with multiple people participating, to one person and hours to obtain the desired recall information.
Resources:
https://www.sqfi.com/why-get-certified/about-sqf-program/